Posted 6 years ago on July 15, 2012, 11 p.m. EST by Antonin
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This content is user submitted and not an official statement

Sorry it's a long read; the concept is essentially simple once you get to it:
A way the will of the people could be the only thing controlling the law.

See, Democracy could work..
Ofcourse that name's a little tainted, though Dem is the Greek root word for People, Pan is the root word for All, and why I'd call a true working system like this a Panocracy, as we know only too well the power of labels; I'll get more into my idea in a moment.

(Skip this paragraph if you like, it's not so relevant though it may interest you)
I'm really a bit of an anarchist, I've seen actually through the development of a computer game where you can lose everything easily, which initially had no rules, originally worked as a positive society for those playing it; with morals and ethics as the closest thing to laws, people people stood up to correct injustice.
Yet over the implementation of safety features and excessive laws, it turned into something resemblant of the almost completely immoral and empty excuse for a society that we have worldwide today.. Nobody wanted it to change like that, but it did, which is why Anarchy is such a delicate state, an easy victim for power-mongers, but that's not why I'm writing to you.

I have an idea, that if put into place, could be the way out, could be the way life just changes, could even be the pioneer of a peaceful revolution and a new society that exists solely for the betterment of mankind; and it would all start with a website.

See, I think a true democracy could work with enough planning and the right initial setup. I thought how can we answer any question? We need a system that can literally do anything it's people want, but how can everything easily be controlled like that?
We have a legal system that's hundreds of years old, it's ancient, and faulty, completely susceptible to corruption; removing the bad guys just makes way for more of them. It's always controlled by a select few, most people don't get to vote on anything, especially not everyone, it's way too much effort and rarely yields a result.
So how could they? How can they vote on absolutely every aspect of everything and allow absolutely nobody to have more power over a decision than anybody else?

World-law.com doesn't exist yet, it's still a concept.

The idea is that we start with some basic very simple laws and precautions, but the main point being that everyone has a Yes/No/Un-voted standing on every law.
Anyone could add laws, subsections to any law, and further subsections to those subsections on which specifics would be voted.
Further laws could limit, categorize, others could prevent any loopholes.
Any aspect of any law could have a for or against vote, all of these just Yes/No tick-boxes next to the titles, with subsections folding down as you click the headers.
Maybe then people would want a settings icon that takes gives them settings to vote Yes/No on, so someone makes a law about that.
Another laws on the popularity of laws could define their pre-disposition to appearing in people's World-Law news-feeds, further subsections could promote them to categories and specific areas etc.
Anything you want, anything you can think of could become a reality.
People don't want to be lab rats for genetically modified Mosquitoes? They vote no.
People don't want banks to be corporations, and rather be simple institutions funded by our taxes to no more than pay the wages of those doing just the essentials like repairing ATMs? Vote on that.
Don't want poison in your water? Vote it away.
Don't want your taxpayer money funding the murder of innocent children? Well hell you could vote on that too!

I can't think of everything, I don't know the best approach to eliminate corporate greed and the waste of resources caused by the consumer market through this system, but I'm confident it could be done with enough minds on it; even if it takes time, we're way better off if the law is what the people say it is.

Anyway, that's just the basics of my idea: the entirety of the people would contribute to every single aspect of the way life works through voting Yes/No to laws anyone can create, managed, and optimized by further laws, again decided on entirely by the people..

This system could eliminate leaders, or selectively put people in situations of power when we want to just for the sake of management, and these people could very easily be removed if they didn't do their job properly.
Unlike today's so called 'leaders', these people would be working FOR the people, if we did go in that direction.
We could create the life we want, and right down to the letter.

A job could be combining identical subsections or splitting them up when there's more than one variable, we'd vote on how many people we have doing this based on how organized or disorganized we think the system is, could even have basic opinion votes that contribute to how much attention relevant laws get as a better way of bringing the important issues to attention..
How anything would be managed and displayed would be designed by new laws to maximise the potential and usability of the user interface, and even having such cosmetic concepts as a separate category and/or subcategory for each law's page could be implemented by people voting to do so..
I could carry on forever theorizing on what could be made with this, but those are the basics I think it would need to start with.
I'd expect it to be a little chaotic for atleast the first few days if not the first few weeks, keeping in mind that ANY aspect of it can be changed by the people with simple yes/no votes, but it would balance out. As numbers grow, as loopholes are discovered and closed, and efficiency becomes maximised, it would start to become what people want it to be.

For now it would need to be a beta, just an emulation, and it would of-course need funding to get off the ground, and I know just how much work it would be for a web designer to keep having to change the design based on what the users vote (of-course the web designers would have to get notifications of changes they have to make based on relevant laws, and a law would have to be made to regulate how often the updates have to be made once it was public..

But just imagine one day if there were terminals for these as often as ATMs, and if people could access it from anywhere, if everyone in the world had an account and access to it, if they could customize the way it works for them, e.g. what it brings to attention, how they sift through laws clicking Yes/No to them.. instead of sifting through images of atrocities on facebook they'd be sifting through laws preventing them clicking No, and laws (technically Rights), to promote freedom. The average of how people want to live and what people want happening would be achieved.

You might say what if people in different places want different laws?
Well they can vote on that, just create a law that votes to have area specific laws or limit the reach of laws they don't like away from their location any way they want, create subsections for aspects of the design, and it then gets made to work the average way people want it to work, the end result would be the average of what people want, even aspects of the way it works can become area specific too within the limits set by the relevant laws to that.
You could log in to your account and show the area affect of laws in your favourite locations once such a feature has been voted on and put your contribution to them, you could vote on what laws you want more likely to pop up in area specific news feeds once that law is designed.
How is it going to be paid for? You vote on how much tax we pay, how it's guarded, and what it's used for. You vote on everything, complete control of the people.
Have any question about how something would work? Write a law about it on which people can have choices, and there we go. Write subsections for where people dispute aspects of it, subsections of those for further petty quarrels, everyone gets their say, compromises can be made, what people want balances out, what Globalists want gets shat all over.
They'll probably try paying for people's votes. We can vote on the length of their jail time.

Now I don't have the resources or web development skills to make this a reality, but IP is not an issue:
Here's my full written consent for anyone take this idea, do what they think best with it, and bring it to life; I don't even have to be a part of it, just make it happen.

Peace be with you, and remember, the people are the only real power, so lets wake the fuck up and stop denying ourselves a real society; their fake value's got nothing on us.

17 Comments

This is fine as long as you are willing to live with the results. North Carolina and California recently voted down gay marriage by direct democracy.

I think the other big problem with this is participation. If people have to vote on every customization to the interface, and every line of every law - people will quickly get overwhelmed and underinvolved. We can't even get our politicians to read the laws they vote on - and it is their full time jobs! Plus, if people don't like the laws, can't they quickly vote to change them - it seems like it could be awful confusing.

And I really don't think a world-law could possibly work in this fashion. Too many cultural differences in what is acceptable and what isn't. Plus the big countries and the more developed countries would have more power in the voting.

Sounds excellent. I think it can be attempted on a small scale in a city environment. Votes would have to easily verified by each voter online but I think it is the eventual evolution of direct democracy.

I would prefer that all eligible voters had to vote. The current low turnout benefits the 1%.

Yes, I disagree with accepting the possible validity of such an answer based merely on a personal experience. Such an answer should be backed by some poll or study to cite so that others can know it on stronger grounds.

My opinion comes from decades of reading about politics and history. Of living a life. Poor people who vote against the interests of the 1% plutocrats are the segment of our society most likely to be apathetic, and most likely to see no hope, and therefore more likely to stay home election day. I'm not gonna do the foot work for you. I don't have to prove anything to you do I.?

It's my opinion. I can be wrong. Like everybody I've been wrong before and I will again. It's ok.

I do know that the party that proudly trumpets the policies of the 1% plutocrats are currently in the midst of a massive effort to suppress the vote. So thats a good sign that low turnout benefits the 1% plutocrats.

Besides you can find studies, polls, graphs that prove anything and everything you want on the interwebs. I rather think for myself.

I'm not telling you to believe what I believe. Maybe you think there is a dearthof 15 plutocrat supporters who aren't voting. Thats your right. You don't have to offer any evidence to back up your opinion.

I thought you questioned my statements 'cause you disagreed. Isn't that what you said?. Do we have to talk about why I think something, Or whether my statements were presented as opinions or statements.

Seems like a distraction. You have yet to weigh in on the substance of the comments. Whassup wit' dat.

As for the substance, perhaps we have different perspectives of what 'substance' pertains to 'cause from my understanding, there is no substance in a mere opinion or baseless statement.

As for my mere opinion, I've seen nothing to suggest that the people who don't vote aren't more or less divided evenly between the left and the right. That is why elections go back and forth between the left and the right without a dominant majority consistently prevailing on either side. I've recently read that roughly 40% of all eligible voters don't vote. In fact, I believe I may have read it in a link I recently posted called "Voting Dilemma" or something like that. If that's true, then roughly 60% of the eligible voters do vote. These can be roughly divided into thirds for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents meaning roughly 20% of the eligible voters for each and probably 10% composing either of the left leaning and right leaning Independents. All in all, even if the eligible voters are far less than 60%, I've come across nothing to suggest that the divisions among the sample size of the voters doesn't reflect the same divisions among the non-voters.

If your statements hadn't turned out to have been mere opinions, I would've seen a great opportunity for the success of FreeDA among left leaning voters.